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Tuesday, July 14, 2015

OK, I couldn’t make it to the finals. First, I just can’t take Chris Berman for that long. I tried muting but I just couldn’t take the hair any longer. Second, it was just too boring. Not as boring as the old format, maybe. But, still too boring to finish.

From the time he turned 11, Giolito’s life was baseball. Even though he was surrounded by Hollywood – Rick is a golfing buddy with Samuel L. Jackson, and Giolito has a signed Mace Windu purple light saber in his room at home – Giolito gravitated toward pitching. Granted, he had no clue where the ball was going, his freshman and sophomore years in high school peppered with 90-plus-mph radar gun readings and balls bouncing in the dirt. After working ...

A trade, when built around urgency and not reason, has the likelihood of rising to the level of ineffectiveness. Mozeliak has pointed several times to the Feliz trade as a lesson for him and his brain trust. In the years since, Mozeliak and his closed-circuit front office have continued to refine their approach to trades, and as this year’s July 31 deadline nears the word Mozeliak has used often to describe it is “disciplined.” With “data-driven ...

Health and a coach that you click with have a possible impact on a player. It will be interesting to see if Maybin can sustain this level of play.

“From the moment I’ve met him,” Maybin said, “I’ve been comfortable with the way he’s conveyed his message to me. It’s made a lot of sense. And the confidence he has when he’s telling you about the things that he believes are going to help you — all it does is make you want to believe in it.”

The 2015 All-Star Game will be played in Cincinnati this coming Tuesday, and all-time hit king Pete Rose will be involved in the on-field ceremonies in some capacity. Needless to say, many have been asked about his lifetime ban, and several believe it is just.

Rapper-slash-A-list celebrity Snoop Dogg, however, is not most. He believes Charlie Hustle belongs in the Hall of Fame and told your Eye on Baseball scribes exactly that during the annual celebrity softball game ...

If he’s not already on your prospect radar, it’s time to put him there.

MLB.com ranks Albies as the Braves’ fifth-best prospect and considered him to be the top speed prospect on the World Team roster that was assembled for the Futures Game. The 18-year-old shortstop has played just 137 games at the professional level, but in the course of doing so, he has given the Braves reason to believe he has special talent.

“The general manager’s job isn’t easy,” Duffy said, “and if you try to play GM, you’re going to go nuts.”

Last year Duffy was a shortstop in Double-A and, “I didn’t even expect to be called up last year. I thought I was capable of playing third and stepping in, but it wasn’t really on my mind at the time. I was just focused on being the best player I could be at Richmond, and whatever the organization saw fit for me next, my mind was always on the next level, Triple-A.”

They just haven’t been able to overcome hideous middle relief. Maybe Doolittle can fix that; maybe he can’t. When a team feels an arm short in the bullpen, it usually is two arms short these days. Then again, being an arm (or two) short in the bullpen isn’t supposed to hurt this badly. It’s clear that Beane’s bunch is more like a second-tier contender than a bottom-feeder, in terms of actual ability. Expected runs allowed paint a fairer picture of the A’s than actual runs allowed; ...

What surprised the Pirates, and many industry observers, was the Tampa Bay Rays preferred a return of young, major league players. The Boston Red Sox also traded their ace, Jon Lester, for a major league player in Yoenis Cespedes prior to the deadline. Huntington said the focus of the sellers has again been on major league talent — not prospects — as the July 31st trade deadline approaches.

Why the change?

“It’s a seller’s market, so there are fewer teams that are looking to trade ...

In the realm of technology, Major League Baseball is far ahead of the curve, and has been for years; it’s so far ahead that many members of the baseball media, still busy carping about the merits of the “human element” and whether steroid users belong in the Hall of Fame, have failed to notice.

For one thing, millennials don’t watch TV, so TV ratings aren’t a useful index of whether a sport is popular among them. Robert Bowman, CEO of baseball’s digital media ...

Larry McLean, under suspension from the New York Giants, is again without an occupation on Tuesday. McLean has been playing in the Delaware Co. [Pennsylvania] ball league, but was released because Manager Bill Cloud thinks Larry “hasn’t class enough for the league.”

And that, as far as I know, is the end of Larry McLean’s baseball career. It’s probably safe to assume McLean drank his way out of this gig, as by this time, alcoholism had completely destroyed his ...

Sunday, July 12, 2015

In a historic performance at Citi Field, the Mets outfielder connected for home runs in each of his first three at-bats against Arizona Diamondbacks pitchers Rubby De La Rosa and Randall Delgado. In doing so, Nieuwenhuis became the first Mets player to ever hit three home runs in a single home game.

Major League Baseball’s Home Run Derby, set for Monday, is a tedious monstrosity of batting-practice gluttony, a swing-killing relic of the steroid era. It is an elephantine affront to the grace, agility and precision of the game….the allure — along with the ratings, which last year were the lowest recorded since 1997 — is gone….

Of course, far from all of Sunday’s participants will attain their full potential, and the game’s poster boy for untapped promise — or wasted talent, as some might put it — would’ve stood alongside A-Rod and Jeter in that hypothetical ’95 game.

As a matter of fact, if you’re not familiar with the tale of Ruben Rivera — No. 2 on that ’95 list, right behind A-Rod and two ahead of his Yankees teammate Jeter — you can go see him ...

U.S.: Lucas Giolito, Nationals (80). With all of the velocity that will be on display, Giolito has the only 80 fastball, an upper-90s (you might see triple digits) heater that stands out even more because of his abilty to command it.

World: Frankie Montas, White Sox (70). Montas has touched triple digits and could do so again on Sunday in his short stint, with many feeling he might belong in the bullpen long-term.

“They just go out and pitch well,” Ventura said. “I don’t know what they’re expecting when they go out there, but they know their room for error might be a little (slim). But they’re continuing to battle. With what (Samardjiza) did (Thursday) and what the kid ( Rodon) did (Friday) … I think it’s great for him to come and pitch in this environment and do what he did.”

Sale has been so brilliant of late that allowing one run while striking out 10 on Saturday ...

Longtime Red Sox coach, minor league manager, and special assistant Dick Berardino has heard once too often how the Sox and the late Lou Gorman were fleeced on the Jeff Bagwell-Larry Andersen deal in 1990. Berardino was a coach on Joe Morgan’s staff and defends Gorman to this day. “It was the right thing at the right time,” said Berardino. “Andersen really helped us that year (15 appearances, 1.23 ERA in 22 innings) win the AL East division. I really get tired of people ...

Rob Refsnyder made his major league debut last night, starting at second base for the Yankees against the Red Sox at Fenway Park. Before the game, I asked the highly-regarded 24-year-old how he’s preparing for his at bats against Eduardo Rodriguez.

“I was just looking at the scouting report,” said Refsnyder. “I like seeing what a fastball is doing – I looked to see if it’s moving – and I’ll go from there.”

For Refsnyder, a .290/.387/.413 hitter in Triple-A, things get simple ...

Daren Willman is as much a coder as he is a baseball fan. And his site, Baseball Savant, is bringing Sabermetrics to the masses. For free [...] This is also a realization on the promise of advanced Sabermetrics that is built on the gobs of PITCHf/x data collected from MLB games. It’s a movement kick-started by sites like Baseball Prospectus and Fangraphs, companies like Sportvision and Baseball Info Solutions, and people like Nate Silver and Dan Brooks, who is an experimental psychologist by ...